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Comment by EdwardDiego | Hacker News Reader

On #1 - humph was hard for me, I've never encountered it in my reading (maybe I'm not reading a particular genre that uses it? Is it something Jane Austen used?), only got it via a a last ditch guess, because I'm familiar with "harrumph" and I had "-umph" already and "h" was the only prefix that remotely made any kind of sense.

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The wordlist definitely isn't perfect, and obviously each person has their own vocabulary, but it still is a key. It's something the creator mentions, if on your first play you run into a stupid word, you probably won't come back the next day. And the fact that the current word list is 1/th the total word count goes to show how many words are ridiculous.

AFAIK his partner actually sifted through all 13k word list and categorized all of them into 3-4 buckets, which is what lead to the final 2.5k answer list.

That's interesting, I suspect a lot of Wordle's success derives from their curation of words to remove things like "abaft" and "imago".

But then I see the NYT went and removed words like "caulk" and "agora" because they were "obscure", and I feel better about humph.

caulk was the word last week though? Nobody I play the game with knew that word. Granted we are not native english speakers. Too hard word every now and then is also unifying experience when everybody stops hating the player and instead hates the game.

Fair point. Caulk might also be more of a British English word than American English word.

I'm not sure about that, given it was used in New Girl, a Fox tv series. The comments thanking new girl for how the solver knew the word was such a refreshing change from "omg NYT ruined it"

...I also learned it was used in that classic millennial childhood game Oregon Trail (because you can caulk the wagon to cross the river)

It's a common word as far as I, an American, knew. But then again my dad was handy around the house and we always had tubes of caulking around.

I saw that there was some grumbling on social media about 'caulk' when it came up - 'how was I supposed to know that word?' etc. Saddened me - you don't need to be a builder or DIY expert to have a vocabulary that includes such terms. It's a modern phenomenon - if a person is shown to not know something they would rather complain about elitism than learn or expand their knowledge.

The NYT notably didn't add words to the list, but a surprising number of people complain they ruined it by adding "obscure" words like "tacit", "swill" and "caulk".

Tbh I can understand never encountering caulk and swill somehow because never did diy or indulge in pig farming or fantasy, but I kinda would have expected "tacit acceptance" to be a common enough phrase if one reads newspapers...

In my country, "swill" is more associated with drinking alcohol these days, due to a misguided attempt at moderating drinking: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/the-six-oclock-swill-begins

Now that I've looked it up I'm "Oh sure." I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have thought of it as a dictionary word or something you would write outside of dialog however.

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